I don’t think I had ever read a Mike Resnick book before picking up Widowmaker, and I doubt I’ll ever read another one. Which is odd, in a way, because I’m not sure I can articulate what was so awful about this book in a way that will sound consistent with my known preferences and prejudices. That is, many of the things that are annoying about this book should in theory annoy me about other books that I like, if I am going to find that sort of thing annoying, and many of the things that I like about other books that I like are similar to things in this book that totally failed to amuse or interest me.
As an example—you know the thing where there’s a Super Assassin with Mad Ninja Skillz, and he’s like, the fully awesummmest kick-ass dood in the known universe, and then he gets in a fight and he either gets his ass kicked or he just barely manages to survive, due to some improbable event or perhaps intervention by a comic relief sidekick? I mean, Super Assassins ought to be very good at that sort of thing, not just very good but unimaginably good. Kind of like I suck at basketball, but my older brother is fairly good, and there was this guy in our high school who was just amazing, and then there’s the pro players who are a totally different level, and then there’s Bill Russell? And if we’ve spent a lot of time establishing that a character is the Bill Russell of murder, and then he can’t manage to easily ice the high school murder star, you know, how am I supposed to take anything else in the book seriously?
Except, of course, that sort of thing happens all the time in books that I like just fine. The Bill Russell of ratiocination is nearly tricked by the high-school cleverness star, the Bill Russell of interstellar war strategy is nearly outfought by the high-school war strategy star, the Bill Russell of wizardry is nearly out-wizarded by the high school wizarding star, the Bill Russell of fellatio is, um, well, the point is that there are lots of books in lots of genres in which that particular thing is not annoying but instead a Source of Reader Pleasure, a convention that allows us to have a plot in the first place. So a complaint about Widowmaker in those terms is missing the fact that there is something about this book that made otherwise enjoyable nonsense into annoying nonsense.
And I don’t think it’s clumsy writing. At least, there wasn’t any point where I looked up from the page in disbelief and said “piscine creatures of the sea”??!?!?!!? There weren’t a lot of bits that I thought were particularly well-phrased, true, but then lots of good stuff I read is utterly without memorable phrases. The plot is, of course, ludicrous and senseless and crazy, and the tech is preposterous and implausible and crazy, and the characters are risible and unbelievable and crazy, and those are all good things in lots of books. But not in this one. Not for Your Humble Blogger, at least not this year.
Which is the distressing part. It’s easy to imagine that if I had read this book ten years ago, or read it ten years from now, I would have had a great time and gone right out and grabbed half-a-dozen more off the shelf. And that’s scary because the book is so awful. Who are these alternate selves that like this trash? Surely they aren’t me, are they?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.